draw-your-font

WHAT IS IT?

draw-your-font turns a photo of your handwritten alphabet into an installable font (TTF, WOFF, WOFF2). You write your letters on paper, take a picture, and the CLI isolates each letter, vectorizes it and assembles the file - no upload, no account. Current output is a single-variant font: kerning, ligatures and letter randomization are announced for v2.

WHY IS IT INTERESTING?

• Zero system dependencies: pure npm, no FontForge, no ImageMagick, no potrace binary to install. Node ≥ 18 is enough, on macOS, Linux or Windows.
• Shared metrics: every character sits in its own vertical band of a 1000-unit em square (cap height, x-height, descender depth). Your g hangs below the baseline and your o stays small.
• Potrace vectorization: the same engine that ships inside FontForge and Inkscape. The AI never draws a letter - it finds and labels them.
• Two ways to run it: a Claude Code skill to iterate in conversation ("make it rounder", "the g looks bad"), or the deterministic CLI on its own, with no AI, listing the characters with --chars.
• Built-in critique: the skill scores the font's legibility and points at the two worst letter pairs. On a bad character it shows you the crop and either fixes it or asks for a re-shoot.
• Printable template: the template command outputs an A4 PDF grid (minimal or spanish charset). Freeform photos work too: spiral binding, page shadow, dim light.
• Web formats: --formats ttf,woff,woff2,css writes the files plus the @font-face snippet. You own the font, commercial use included.

USE CASES

• Dress a personal site or portfolio in your own handwriting.
• Digitize someone's handwriting to keep it as a font file.
• Build a handwritten typeface for a visual identity without a monthly subscription.
• Tune the result with --weight and --smooth, then check it with the preview command.